The central truth of human existence—nobody here gets out alive—is, unsurprisingly, the one we are most loath to dwell upon. (Some psychologists call it terror management.) But what if the knowledge of your onrushing demise can scarcely avoid being top of mind, not just for a few moments while the plane is plummeting, but for months before a sure and certain end date for all of humanity? What would you do?

That’s the backdrop to Ben Winters’s lovely Last Policeman trilogy, which began with the 2012 novel of the same name, when it is March of the year an asteroid is on course to slam into Earth on Oct. 3. The series moved through the summertime of Countdown City (2013) and has now reached a point just 14 days before impact, in World of Trouble, published July 15. “I was looking for a new way to tell a detective story about the classic stubborn investigator—Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade—who cares when no one else does,” says Winters, 38, in an interview.

He certainly found one. Post-apocalyptic novels are virtually a genre of their own, but a pre-apocalypse is arrestingly different. Across the world, in Winters’s books, people respond to the news of their coming deaths in every imaginable way. There is a steady wave of suicides, even while many people, heads down, keep to their daily routine as best they can. Millions abandon their old lives, including spouses and children, in pursuit of bucket-list dreams—some high-minded, some vicious—before time and the value of money run out.

In the early days, before people start murdering each other for potable water or ground beef, one wild-eyed young man in a university library seems intent on reading every great book ever written. Another character, in one of Winters’s black-humoured satirical jabs, continually stares into his useless iPhone. “I just know,” laughs the writer, “that there will be those who won’t give up their phones no matter what. I took great pleasure in killing off the Internet.”

Then there’s Henry Palace, a cop in Concord, N.H., and a knight-errant. He enters the story investigating a suspicious death no one else wastes time over. It is, after all, just another suicide, one achieved by the locally favoured means, hanging. (In the Midwest, writes Winters—who was born in Maryland to a Canadian mother, and now lives in Indianapolis—“they prefer shotguns.”) Given Palace’s doggedness in the face of his limited lifespan, it’s not surprising that more than a few readers think he has a screw loose. “I’ve had people ask me where I’d put him on the autistic spectrum,” Winters acknowledges. “But that’s not the case at all. Henry is just one of those people doing exactly what he was put on Earth to do. He was meant to be a detective: he’s obsessed with solving puzzles and he wants to restore moral order.”

That’s most apparent in Henry’s relationship with his sister Nico. Six years younger, clever, ruthless and far more devastated than her brother by the violent deaths of their parents years before, Nico is a responsibility Henry will not abandon. She’s his polar opposite, in thrall to mad schemes to save the world, even at the cost of individual lives.Henry works his salvations one human at a time.

The trilogy is a vehicle for Winters to explore those responses and to follow the path great crime novels have always taken. “They all offer more than a mystery, a social portrait actually. Nothing didactic, just an invitation: ‘Here’s something to think about.’ ” Hence the young woman at the Free Republic of New Hampshire (essentially the state university student body) who passionately explains to Palace how the republic has hit an elusive sweet spot. All utopian communities inevitably yield to their dark totalitarian streaks, she agrees, but not hers. This time, there is no time: the asteroid will arrive “before the Jacobins can take over.” (Winters based the Free Republic on the Occupy movement. “I was impressed by the way it self-organized.”)

But—nothing didactic here—the trilogy is a sweet and powerful story of relationships, as Henry desperately tries to patch his with his only living relative, sometime before the end of all things.

Well, the Mayan doom-pocalypse was not as predicted. But at least it’s in good company. Since the beginning of time, humans have predicted the world’s demise. For the highlights of historic end-day prophesying, check out the infographic below. (And for a terrifyingly long list of unrealized predictions, head over to the Wikipedia page that catalogues the non-catastrophes).

A Kenyan-American college student has been charged with murder after admitting to cutting up a guest that was staying in his family’s home and eating his brain and heart.

Police in Harford County, MD say that Alex Kinyua, 21, admitted to killing Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, a Ugandan graduate student who was living with the Kinyua family while awaiting deportation.

Kinyua took engineering at Morgan State University, a historically black university in Baltimore. He was in good standing with the university. His father is a professor there.

Kinyua has a history of strange behavior, reports CTV. In January, he was “disenrolled” from Morgan State’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a military training program.

In February, he posted on Facebook asking fellow students whether they were “strong enough to endure ritual HBCU mass human sacrifices around the country and still be able to function as human beings?”

That has added to Internet chatter over whether a “zombie apocalypse” is coming considering other recent high-profile incidents of zombie-like violence in the United States. In May, a Florida man’s face was eaten off by another man who was supposedly high on drugs called “bath salts.”

It was the worst of times, it was the not quite so worst of times. The predecessor to this book was called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and, given the title, you may be tempted to respond, “C’mon, man. You told us last time it was the end of the world. Well, where the hell is it? I want my money back. Instead, you come breezing in with this season’s Armageddonouttahere routine. It’s like Barbra Streisand farewell tours—there’ll be another along next summer.”

Well, now: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It was about the impending collapse of all of the Western world except America.

The good news is that the end of the rest of the West is still on schedule. The bad news is that America shows alarming signs of embracing the same fate, and then some.

Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true. From an author’s point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: the bookstores get looted and the collapse of the banking system makes it harder to cash the royalty cheque. But Cassandra’s warnings were cursed to go unheeded, and so it seems are mine. Last time ’round, I wrote that Europe was facing a largely self-inflicted perfect storm that threatened the very existence of some of the oldest nation-states in the world. My warning proved so influential that America decided to sign up for the same program, but supersized. Heigh-ho.

It starts with the money. In “The Run Upon the Bankers” (1720), Jonathan Swift wrote:

A baited banker thus desponds,

From his own hand foresees his fall,

They have his soul, who have his bonds;

’Tis like the writing on the wall.

A lot of writing on the wall these days. Who has the bonds of a “developed world” developed to the point that it’s institutionally conditioned to living beyond its means? Foreigners with money. So who’s available and flush enough? The Chinese Politburo; Saudi sheikhs lubricated with oil but with lavish worldwide ideological proselytizing to fund; Russian “businessmen.” These are not the fellows one might choose to have one’s bonds, never mind one’s soul, but there aren’t a lot of other options.

So it starts with the money—dry stuff about numbers and percentage of GDP. As Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado fumed to a room of voters in 2010, “We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view, we have nothing to show for it.”

He’s right—and $13 trillion is the lowest of lowball estimates. But why then did Sen. Bennet vote for the “stimulus” and ObamaCare and all the other trillion-dollar binges his party blew through? Why did Sen. Bennet string along and let the 111th Congress (2009-2011) run up more debt than the first one hundred Congresses (1789-1989) combined? Panicked by pre-election polls into repudiating everything he’d been doing for the previous two years, the senator left it mighty late to rediscover his virtue. You would think that Colorado voters might have remembered that, like Groucho Marx apropos Doris Day, they knew Michael Bennet before he was a virgin. Alas, an indulgent electorate permitted the suddenly abstemious spendaholic to squeak back into office.

And, contra Sen. Bennet, eventually you do have something to show for it. It starts with the money, but it doesn’t stop there. It ends with a ruined and reprimitivized planet, in fewer easy stages than you might expect. Let’s take a thought by the economist Herbert Stein:

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

This is a simple but profound observation. Dr. Stein first used it in the context of the long-ago debts and deficits of the Reagan era. “The Federal debt cannot rise forever relative to the GNP. Our foreign debt cannot rise forever relative to the GNP,” he said. “But, of course, if they can’t, they will stop.” It was, as he later wrote, “a response to those who think that if something cannot go on forever, steps must be taken to stop it—even to stop it at once.” And he has a point: if something can’t go on, you don’t have to figure out a way to stop it, because it’s going to stop anyway.

Eventually.

As you might have noticed, since he first made the observation, the debt has gone on rising, very dramatically. But the truth is unarguable. If you’re careening along a road toward a collapsed bridge, you’ll certainly stop, one way or the other. But it makes a difference, at least to you, whether you skid to a halt four yards before the cliff edge or whether you come to rest at the bottom of the ravine.

In 2010, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), described current U.S. deficits as “unsustainable.” On that everyone’s agreed. So let’s make them even more so! On assuming office, President Obama assured us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible wastrel of a predecessor had taken the federal budget on an eight-year joyride. So the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor could get things under control was to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.” Let’s head for the washed-out bridge, but at Obamacrous Speed!

The Spendballs plans of the Obama administration took the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-2008 and doubled it, all the way to 2020. “We’ve got a big hole that we’re digging ourselves out of,” the President declared in 2011. Usually, when you’re in a hole, it’s a good idea to stop digging. But, seemingly, to get out of the Bush hole, we needed to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of the President’s economics czar, Ms. Rose Coloured-Glasses.

By 2020, the actual hole will be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 per cent. That’s crazy. Obama’s solution was to attempt to crank it up to 25 to 30 per cent as a permanent feature of life. That’s load up the suicide-bomber underpants and pass me the matches.

The CBO doesn’t put it quite like that. Musing on the likelihood of a sudden fiscal crisis, it murmurs blandly, “The exact point at which such a crisis might occur for the United States is unknown, in part because the ratio of federal debt to GDP is climbing into unfamiliar territory.”

But it’ll get real familiar real soon. A lot of the debate about America’s date with destiny has an airy-fairy beyond-the-blue-horizon mid-century quality, all to do with long-term trends and other remote indicators. In fact, we’ll be lucky to make it through the short-term in sufficient shape to get finished off by the long-term. According to CBO projections, by 2055, interest payments on the debt will exceed federal revenues. But I don’t think we’ll need to worry about a “Government of the United States” at that stage. By 1788, Louis XVI’s government in France was spending a mere 60 per cent of revenues on debt service, and we know how that worked out for the House of Bourbon shortly thereafter.

So take your eye off the far prospect, and instead look about 14 inches in front of your toecap. Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military. You read that right: more on debt service than on the armed services. According to the CBO’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the government will be paying between 15 and 20 per cent of its revenues in debt interest. Whereas defence spending will be down to between 14 and 16 per cent.

Just to clarify: we’re not talking about paying down the federal debt, just keeping up with the annual interest charges on it. Yet within a decade the United States will be paying more in interest payments than it pays for the military—and that’s not because the Pentagon is such a great bargain. In 2009, the United States accounted for over 43 per cent of the world’s military expenditures. So America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have evolved from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers. The CBO numbers foresee net interest payments rising from nine per cent of revenue to 36 per cent in 2030, then to 58 per cent in 2040, and up to 85 per cent in 2050. If that trajectory holds, we’ll be spending more than the planet’s entire military budget on debt interest.

But forget mid-century—because, unless something changes, whatever goes by the name of “America” under those conditions isn’t worth talking about.

By 2010, about half our debt was owned by foreigners, and somewhere over a quarter of that was held by the Chinese (officially).

What does that mean? In 2010, the U.S. spent about $663 billion on its military, China about $78 billion. If the People’s Republic carries on buying American debt at the rate it has in recent times, then within a few years U.S. interest payments on that debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese armed forces. In 2010, the Pentagon issued an alarming report to Congress on Beijing’s massive military buildup, including new missiles, upgraded bombers, and an aircraft carrier research and development program intended to challenge U.S. dominance in the Pacific. What the report didn’t mention is who’s paying for it.

Answer: Mr. and Mrs. America.

To return to the President’s declared strategy: “We’ve got a big hole that we’re digging ourselves out of.” Every politician’s First Rule of Holes used to be: when you’re in one, stop digging. If you don’t, as every child knows, eventually you dig so deep you come out on the other side of the world—someplace like, oh, China. By 2015 or so, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers. As Bugs Bunny is wont to say when his tunnel comes out somewhere unexpected: “I musta took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.” Indeed. When the Commies take Taiwan, suburban families in Albuquerque and small businesses in Pocatello will have paid for it.

And even that startling scenario is premised on the most optimistic assumptions—of resumed economic growth but continued low interest rates. If interest rates were to return to, say, 5.7 per cent (the average for the period 1990-2010), the debt service projections for 2015 would increase from $290 billion to $847 billion. China would be in a position to quadruple its military budget and stick U.S. taxpayers with the bill.

The existential questions for America loom not decades hence, but right now. It is not that we are on a luge ride to oblivion but that the prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction. And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed.

Jonathan Swift’s “writing on the wall” comes from Belshazzar’s feast:

Babylon’s king is whooping it up when, in the midst of his revelries, disembodied fingers spell out the words “mene mene, tekel, upharsin.” They’re currency units: half-dollar, half-dollar, penny and two bits. Only Daniel the Jew understands what it means:

Mene: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.”

Tekel: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”

Upharsin: “Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”

Today, the units are larger than in Babylon: “Mene mene, tekel, upharsin” is now trillion trillion, billion, half-trillion. But the upshot’s the same. We’ve spent too much of tomorrow today—to the point where we’ve run out of tomorrow: fiscally, our days are numbered; structurally, we’ve been weighed in the balances and found wanting; and geopolitically, the Medes are thin on the ground but the Persians have gone nuclear.

Everywhere we turn, there are ominous signs. Birds by the hundreds falling from the sky. Fish by the thousands washing up on shore. Ears by the millions bleeding from the Super Bowl halftime show. This seems like a good time for another edition of: What’s Killing Us Now?

Superstorms. The Earth’s northern magnetic pole, which usually moves around a little each year, is suddenly making a beeline for Russia—possibly because Sarah Palin yelled at it from her porch. Pick a side, magnetism!

Whatever the reason, some experts believe the shift is causing havoc with the weather and may ultimately set off a cycle of dangerous superstorms with winds as high as 600 km/h. Gusts of that magnitude “would likely destroy anything they come into contact with,” said one report, which I believe was published in the Journal of Duh.

The implications are many. Mass death. Untold destruction. Plus, CNN is running out of time to genetically engineer a team of 1,300-lb. super-correspondents with the lower centre of gravity required to pointlessly stand outside during such storms.

Pets. Do you enjoy sharing your bed with the family dog or cat? According to new research, this is definitely something you should continue doing if you’re a fan of cuddling and agony.

According to a U.S. veterinary professor, domestic animals that sleep with or lick their owners are more likely to pass on “zoonoses”—which sounds like a Dr. Seuss book but is actually a range of diseases that are mostly minor, except for the ones that kill you.

I for one am as shocked as any dog owner. Who’d have thought animals that thrust their noses toward the anus of each playmate and consider feces a tasty snack would wind up being dangerous to French kiss?

Jesus Christ. Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster, takes to the airwaves each week to spread the joyful news that WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!! In fact, Camping has pegged May 21 as the exact date on which the son of God will return to steal the Mayans’ 2012 thunder, bring existence to a close on His schedule and maybe see that Spider-Man musical if he can wangle a ticket. On this day of reckoning, the righteous will be elevated into the kingdom of heaven and everyone else will pretty much be an extra in a disaster movie.

It’s scarcely worth noting that Camping has predicted the rapture before. On Sept. 6, 1994, his followers gathered and obediently held their Bibles to the sky—but they were stood up. In Camping’s defence, it was only two days later that Michael Jackson planted that kiss on Lisa Marie Presley at the MTV Awards, a moment that certainly felt to most of us like the end of creation.

Ashton Kutcher. During a recent interview in Men’s Fitness magazine, the actor claimed he keeps fit in order to protect his family during the apocalypse. Kutcher now claims he didn’t mean it, that he was simply being funny. Fine—there’s a first time for everything, I guess.

But hang on—consider what we witnessed at the Super Bowl in Texas. Up in the VIP box: George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice… Ashton Kutcher. Clearly, the ark is being built and he has passage! The apocalypse looms! The rest of us don’t have much time to be thankful we don’t have to watch the movies he makes on that ark!

If all this talk of your inevitable demise has got you down, here’s a pick-me-up—there’s a chance you will never die. Unfortunately, that’s because there’s a chance that you don’t actually exist.

A new book by Brian Greene, a respected theoretical physicist, explores the theory that supercomputers will eventually become powerful enough to run simulations featuring “people” who believe they are real. Sounds fun, right? Who wouldn’t want to recreate the past so they could witness life in the 15th century or jump in and punch Chad Kroeger in the face at the exact moment he decides to form Nickelback?

But wait: if such simulations will one day be possible, there’s no guarantee that we aren’t already living inside a simulation—”perhaps one created by future historians with a fascination for what life was like back on 21st-century Earth,” Greene writes.

The downside: everything we have ever known, touched or loved is a synthetic lie. The upside: so is Ashton Kutcher.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/take-cover-friends-the-end-is-nigh/feed/32012 Are you ready?http://www.macleans.ca/culture/2012-are-you-ready/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/2012-are-you-ready/#commentsFri, 30 Oct 2009 19:00:55 +0000Brian Bethunehttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=89364It’s not just a movie for those who believe the world really will end then

Even though there are still three years to go, give or take a few months, before the end of civilization as we know it, Hollywood has decided to cash in now with 2012, director Roland Emmerich’s $200-million love letter to special effects. Perfectly reasonable plan. After all, millions worldwide believe that cataclysmic destruction—or, just maybe, total spiritual transformation—will commence as soon as the millennia-old Mayan calendar grinds to a halt on Dec. 21, 2012. In either case there won’t be any Ferrari dealers, cocaine suppliers or anyone else to lavish the film profits on. And, for true believers, there’s every motive to go for the gold now. That may have been the thinking of Richard Heene, when the father of six-year-old Falcon concocted the Balloon Boy stunt. “Heene believes the world is going to end in 2012,” according to his friend Richard Thomas. “Because of that he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a bunker or something underground, where he can be safe from the sun exploding.”

Our friendly neighbourhood star going supernova may be the only destructive touch missing from 2012. The official trailer for the movie, which opens on Nov. 12, has earthquakes, tsunamis and super-volcanos. Whole cities slide into the ocean, and an aircraft carrier, tossed like a child’s toy, lands on the White House. Religious imagery is even harder hit: the dome of St. Peter’s rolls over the faithful; in Rio de Janeiro the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer crumples to the ground; and a lone Buddhist monk (an ecumenical touch, perhaps) is swept away as a wave crashes over his mountaintop shrine. What brings on this Götterdämmerung is barely hinted at in the trailer; according to early reports, it’s not much clearer in the film itself.

The movie opens in the present, as scientists note unusually fierce solar storms, which they fear will have alarming, although unspecified, effects on earth. By 2010 the American president (Danny Glover) knows the planet has had it; he calls a meeting of world leaders, in part because he needs the help of a dictatorship untroubled by nosy news media or basic human rights. And so in China, the army starts displacing villagers to begin what it calls a dam-building project.

By 2012 signs of the coming apocalypse—minor earthquakes and random fissures along the U.S. West Coast among them—are plentiful, and the movie proper begins. John Cusack, playing Los Angeles science fiction writer and limo driver Jackson Curtis, picks up his two children to go camping in Yellowstone National Park. (Leaving L.A., what with the quakes and the fissures, is a good idea; heading to Yellowstone, the currently quiescent site of the world’s largest super-volcano and a major focus of 2012 anxiety, is not. You’d think a SF writer would know that.)

Meanwhile, the conspiracy, like the San Andreas Fault itself, cracks wide open. We learn what the Chinese were really up to: constructing high-tech ships for world leaders and a sprinkling of the global elite to ride out the storm. The only happy ending in sight means cheering for the Curtis family to make it onto one of those new arks; that almost everyone else on earth will perish is a given. “I said to myself that I’ll do one more disaster movie, but it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in,” Emmerich cheerfully sums up.

As over the top as 2012 may seem—a tsunami that washes over the Himalayas?—for those who actually believe 2012 marks the end of all things and have actual explanations why, it may not be over the top enough. Belgian author Patrick Geryl, who in 2002 penned the bestselling The Orion Prophecy: Will the World Be Destroyed in 2012? (he dispensed with the question mark in 2005’s The World Cataclysm in 2012), believes the North and South poles will switch positions in a cataclysm of destruction. He wrote in a recent online posting, “I explained abundantly clearly that life after a polar reversal is nothing but horror, pure unimaginable horror. All securities you presently have—food, transport, and medicines—will have disappeared in one big blow, dissolved into nothingness. As will our complete civilization. It cannot be more horrifying than this.” He then added, in the aggrieved tone used by prophets through the ages who found their audience’s attention drifting, “Are you grasping the facts?”

Millions have. Books and websites about 2012 have mushroomed: Amazon lists 299 doomsday 2012 titles and another 87 “2012 transformation” texts; Googling “2012 end of world” brings 13 million hits; and 2012 conventions are a booming business. Popular awareness of the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar began to take off in 1987, when Mexican-American author José Argüelles, one of the originators of the Earth Day concept and founder of the first Whole Earth Festival in 1970, published his influential book, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology. In it he argued that the end of the Mayan calendar would bring the dawn of a new era of spiritual awareness. At next January’s Tipping Point meeting in Cancun, Mexico, Argüelles and other leading New Age thinkers will discuss their visions of the future before leading a tour of Mayan sites.

That all sounds decidedly un-Emmerich, but the German director is well in the mainstream (so to speak) of 2012ers, most of whom—like Richard Heene—expect a far larger, and considerably more physical, bang. Their conventions tend to be survivalist-themed and feature tips on seed swapping and living off the land. The two wings of the movement have influenced each other—the New Agers often allow that birth brings pain and blood, as well as joy, and the doomsayers were happy to pick up a date stamp.

Those who predict disaster suggest, among other causes, the Yellowstone super-volcano that Jackson Curtis is heading straight toward. (But its appearance in 2012 is only as a sideshow, a mere continent-killer.) For real, planet-wide annihilation, you need something bigger. Outside the film world, some doomsayers have lasered in on the planet Nibiru, which—despite having no evidence of its existence— many say is completing its 3,600-year-long orbit around the sun. In 2012 it will crash into the earth or at least wreak serious havoc by a near miss. Or perhaps polar reversal. As Geryl and others argue it, North and South have suddenly switched position before, and are going to do so again you-know-when. The globe will start rotating in the opposite direction, making the sun seem to rise in the west, even as the momentum of the former rotational direction causes the planet’s crust to buckle and the seas to sweep, 2012-style, over the land. What links these suspects is the coming solar maximum: a Nibiru near miss will whack us by causing polar reversal: polar reversal, in 2012, triggers Yellowstone; most explanations of the pole switch pin it on a massive solar storm striking earth.

The sun’s storm activity waxes and wanes according to an 11- to 13-year sunspot cycle. That the next solar maximum, when storms are most frequent and powerful, will climax (probably) in three years is what gives the 2012 phenomenon its veneer of scientific validity. Although scientists reject the idea that a solar storm—or anything else for that matter—is about to start the earth abruptly turning in the opposite direction, many have their own worries about the coming maximum. The sun cycle’s supposed quiet period has actually been quite active, leading to questions about how it will behave at maximum. And as Laurence Joseph, a skeptical science writer and author of Apocalypse 2012, notes, “the cycle we’re now in is like the one that led to the Carrington event.”

That six-day solar storm of 1859—the most powerful ever recorded—brought down telegraph systems worldwide. Something like another Carrington event would now strike a civilization far more electricity-dependent. Joseph points to a study by the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Severe Space Weather Events.” The NAS notes that electricity makes everything else work; if we lose it for long enough, “water distribution will be affected within hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating and air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on.” A worst-case scenario would see giant solar flares frying the transmission grid sufficiently as to leave more than 130 million North Americans without power, perhaps for years.

Even so, despite the suffering that would result, it would hardly add up to the extinction of humanity. And the solution, according to Joseph and many experts, is relatively simple: a series of large-scale surge protectors placed at strategic points along the electrical grid. The cost? About $300 million to $500 million, chump change, Joseph says, in the age of billion-dollar bank bailouts.

Despite its recent rumblings, fear of 12-21-12, as it’s often styled, can hardly be blamed on our local star. Or even on the Mayans, who had virtually nothing to say about the day after—most scholars assume they expected to do what we do when the desk calendar reaches Dec. 31: start a new one. But it says a lot about what 2,000 years of half-expecting Armageddon has wrought in what was once Christendom, and about our fascination with numerology. A decade ago, for everyone who feared computer chaos as the clock ticked down to 2000, many more were simply in thrall—all those numbers turning over together had to mean something. But 9/11 notwithstanding, life hasn’t changed much. The sun still rises, and in the east too. But maybe a few surge protectors would be prudent.

“He stood there silent for a moment. It was a quiet spring evening, silent except for a few birds chirping, the distant bark of a dog . . . rather nice, actually.

“ ‘I don’t hear anything.’

“ ‘That’s it, Dad. There’s no traffic noise from the interstate.’

“He turned and faced toward the road. It was concealed by the trees . . . but she was right; there was absolute silence. When he had first purchased the house, that had been one disappointment he had not thought of while inspecting it but was aware of the first night in, the rumble of traffic from the interstate a half mile away. The only time it fell silent was in the winter during a snowstorm or an accident . . .

“ ‘Most likely the accident’s further on and people were told to pull over and wait,’ he said.

“The girls nodded . . . It was almost eerie. You figure you’d hear something, a police siren if there was indeed an accident, cars down on old Highway 70 should still be passing by.

“And then he looked up. He felt a bit of a chill.

“This time of day any high-flying jets would be pulling contrails . . . ”

But there aren’t any contrails, or jets. It’s America “one second after,” to use the title of William R. Forstchen’s novel.

One Second After what? After an EMP attack. What’s EMP? “Electromagnetic pulse.” You’re on a ship hundreds of miles offshore floating around the ocean, and you fire a nuke. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hit Cleveland, or even Winnipeg. Instead, it detonates 300 miles up in the sky at a point roughly over the middle of the continent. No mushroom cloud, no fallout, you don’t even notice it. That’s the “second” in One Second After and what comes after is America (and presumably pretty much all of Canada south of Yellowknife) circa 1875—before Edison. The cars on the interstate stop because they all run on computers, except for Grandma’s 1959 Edsel. And so do the phones and fridges and pretty much everything else. If you were taking a hairpin bend when your Toyota Corolla conked out, don’t bet on the local emergency room: they’re computerized, too. And, if you’ve only got $27.43 in your purse, better make it last. The ATM won’t be working, and anyway whatever you had in your account just vanished with the computer screen.

Mr. Forstchen tells his tale well, putting an up-to-the-minute scientifically sound high-tech gloss on an old-fashioned yarn. One Second After is set in small-town North Carolina, but the stock characters of Anyburg, U.S.A. are all here—the sick kid, slow-on-the-uptake local officials, gangs of neo-barbarians, the usual conflict between self-reliant can-do types and the useless old hippies. I liked this passage:

“ ‘What a world we once had,’ he sighed.

“The parking lot of the bank at the next corner was becoming weed-choked, though that was being held back a bit by children from the refugee center plucking out any dandelions they saw and eating them.”

And at that point I stopped thinking of One Second After as a movie-thriller narrative, and more in geopolitical terms. After all, the banks in America and western Europe are already metaphorically weed-choked, and may yet become literally so. In the Wall Street Journal a couple of months back, Peggy Noonan predicted that by next year the mayor of New York, “in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one’s here and nobody cares”—or, to put it another way, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression Manhattan’s already been hit by an EMP attack. A friend of mine saw his broker in February and asked him where he should be moving his money, expecting to be pointed in the direction of various under-publicized stocks or perhaps some artfully leveraged instrument novel enough to fly below the Obama radar. His broker, wearing a somewhat haunted look, advised him to look for a remote location and a property he could pay cash for and with enough cleared land and a long growing season. My friend’s idea of rural wilderness is Martha’s Vineyard, so this wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear.

And this is before EMP hits.

So it wipes out your bank accounts. What’s in there? I mean, really. The average American household is carrying $121,953 in personal debt. What would be so bad if something goofy happened and all the meters got reset to zero? And Joe Schmoe’s credit card debt is as nothing compared to what the government’s signed him up for: USA Today recently calculated that the average American household is on the hook for $546,668 in federal debt—i.e., not including state and municipal. The Atlantic crunched the numbers further and reckoned that, to pay off the federal/personal debt over half a century at three per cent, the average household would have to write an annual cheque for $25,971. U.S. median household income is 50 grand, before taxes—and that $26,000 cheque assumes no further increase in federal or personal liabilities.

Critics of USA Today’s methodology say they’ve conflated two separate things—hard government debt, and the rather more amorphous obligations of Medicare, social security and other unsustainable entitlement programs. But, insofar as that’s a distinction with a difference, it’s the entitlements that are harder to slough off. A couple of decades down the road, Greece’s public pensions liabilities will be approaching 25 per cent of GDP: for the political class, it’s easier to default on foreign debt and risk unknown consequences than to renege on social commitments and ensure the certainty of violent insurrection. As attractive as it might be to tell ingrate geezers to go eat dog food, it’s not politically feasible in a democracy in which they’re the most electorally vindictive demographic group.

Besides, in a society that’s all but eliminated the concept of moral hazard, who isn’t entitled to government largesse? The North American auto industry pays its workers so much that it’s unable to make a car at a price anyone’s prepared to pay for it. So naturally it’s been delivered into the corporate control of the very same unions who demanded those salaries. Under the hilarious Canadian bailout, “social justice” requires that auto workers who make $70 per hour be subsidized by taxpayers making less than a third thereof. If it’s unreasonable to expect a guy on 70 bucks an hour to make provision for lean times, why should anyone else? The advanced Western democracy has, in effect, jumped the bounds of temporal and spatial reality: America lives beyond the means of its 300 million citizens to pay for it, so passes the check to its children and grandchildren. Most of the rest of the West does likewise, but demographically has no kids to stick it to.

Professor Glenn Reynolds, America’s Instapundit, noted that USA Today figure of $668,621 federal/personal debt per household and observed tersely: “Debts that can’t be repaid won’t be repaid.” Or to extend the old saw: if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If everyone owes a million dollars, civilizational survival has a problem. When I first heard about EMP a few years back, the big worry was that in a split-second it would vaporize trillions of dollars of wealth. From the perspective of 2009, vaporizing trillions of dollars of debt has something to commend it.

Published more or less simultaneously with William Forstchen’s EMPocalypse now is Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift by Paul A. Rahe, a scholarly analysis of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville and their lessons for us today. Yet both books are concerned at least in part with the relationship between the modern state and technology. Professor Rahe cites Tocqueville’s observation on absolute monarchs in whom resided “a power almost without limits”—in theory. But in practice, wrote Tocqueville, “almost never did it happen that they made use of it.” They lacked the machinery: you were in your peasant hovel upcountry and His Majesty was in his palace hundreds of miles away, and “the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.” Not anymore: regulations for this, permits for that, government identity numbers for routine transactions, computer records for every humdrum manoeuvre of existence, fulfilling Tocqueville’s vision of an administrative despotism in which all the King’s subjects could be made subordinate to “the details of a uniform set of regulations.” As the “bailouts” and “stimulus” pile up, so the micro-regulatory regime will intensify.

At least until the EMP attack.

I’m not suggesting it’s the solution to all our problems. Just saying that, compared to the various other options for advanced democratic society, William Forstchen’s apocalyptic scenario may be one of those 1950s creature features where you wind up rooting for the creature.